Time to ban plastic bags in the Cowichan Valley

We need it to survive as much as the food we eat and the air we breathe. I mean, if Earth is taken away, humans don’t exist anymore. So, my question is: why do we treat it so badly?

As Canadians, we use about 2.86 billion plastic bags annually. They’re cheap and easy, but 80 bags per person a year is ridiculous. Most of this ends up in landfills or cast aside and ends up in the ocean.

This is costing the lives of about 100,000 marine animals every year, only because about one in 200 bags are recycled. The fact is we use too many, as humans we have learned to be careless and being this way most of us don’t seem to notice what it’s doing, or we do notice but we feel overwhelmed with this problem.

I want to do something. In our community, plastic bags are not accepted at curbside pick-ups, which makes most of us default to throwing them in the garbage and then being brought to landfills instead of us taking them to the recycling depot ourselves to recycle.

I am moving towards a more permanent solution. I believe that banning plastic bags in our community will benefit us exceptionally.

There are many alternatives to plastic bags, the main one being reusable bags.

There are others such as paper bags, biodegradable bags and boxes. The produce boxes that are used to transport groceries to the location can easily be reused before recycling.

We need to educate our community about the toll plastic bags are having on our Earth if we don’t do anything.

By getting our city businesses to cooperate, this could be a reality. Let us do our part to save our planet, reduce our garbage and our carbon footprint.

Let’s ban plastic bags in our community. We should do what we can to save this planet and start protecting it.